It's not a driver, it is -firmware-. It contains only code run on the NIC itself.
If you did NOT receive the message:
Code:
bwi0: error 2, could not read firmware bwi-airforce
then the firmware was loaded.
The use of gnome does not matter, dhclient(8) can be run from any shell as the superuser.
Now, it is time to look at the output of "ifconfig bwi0" and see what it says about the status of your wireless networks.